Climategate Scientist Admits No Warming Since 1995

Climategate’s top scientist admits no global warming since 1995, according to BBC News 13 Feb 2010 and Daily Mail 14 Feb 2010. Professor Phil Jones the leading scientist under investigation following the “Climategate” e-mail and data leak, admitted on a BBC News interview, there has been no significant global warming since 1995. When asked: “Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming? Jones answered: “Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level.” When asked if the trend from 2002 to the present was one of cooling Jones said: “No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (¬0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.” When asked whether the rate the most recent period of warming from 1975 to 1998 was no different from previous periods of increasing temperature, i.e. 1860-1880 and 1910-1940, Jones admitted the warming rates were “similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.” This is an important admission because the earlier warming periods are considered to be from natural processes, not man-made.

Jones and an American colleague Michael Mann, had a large part in producing the now discredited “hockey stick graph” which showed no signs of the well documented Medieval Warm Period (MWP), and indicated the recent warming was unprecedented over the last thousand years. This was used by the IPCC to convince politicians that current warming was a dangerous man-made phenomenon. Jones admitted the MWP occurred in the Northern Hemisphere and was as warm as the current period but said there was not enough data from the tropics and southern hemisphere to say it was a global. He admitted: “Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the latev20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.” Jones still believes the current warming is unprecedented and is caused by man-made factors. He and some colleagues at the University of East Anglia climate centre have been found guilty of ignoring legal Freedom of Information requests for data from the centre, and Jones has confessed to not keeping records in any usable form and that the data used to promote man-made global warming may have been lost.

Editorial Comment: A trend of minus 0.12 degrees C per decade equals 0.096 degrees cooling over the last eight years. That may not seem significant, but it is the opposite of the politicians’ and popular media’s dire warnings of unrelenting heating. No wonder Jones and colleagues didn’t want the data to be released into the public domain, even if they haven’t lost any of it. Jones is partly right about the Medieval Warm Period lack of data from the tropics and southern hemisphere for that period, as groups such as the aboriginals in Australia and most natives throughout the Pacific region have no written accounts of any time period. However a recent article in Science, vol. 324, p78, 3 April 2009 presented “globally distributed proxy data” for the past 947 years indicating the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that followed were associated with changes in massive ocean currents involving both hemispheres.

In the meantime masses of money, media hype and politicians’ promises are being wasted propping up a theory founded on data that has been manipulated into discredited graphs and may no longer exist. With recent revelations of mistakes by the IPCC, and regional raw data being re-analysed, the global warming facade is cracking, but don’t start cheering yet. Politicians, media managers and carbon traders will not easily give up the power and money that comes with global warming alarmism. Instead, we should be humbling ourselves before our Creator, who is in charge of the climate, and getting on with the things we can do to be good stewards of the earth. (Ref. weather, politics, climate change)